


The World Remade

by Ally147



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Mental Instability, Post-War, Remix, memory manipulation as punishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 10:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7931035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ally147/pseuds/Ally147
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel Mason doesn't know who, or what, he is.</p><p>But she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Remade

**Author's Note:**

> The couple remixed for this story is Karou/Akiva from Laini Taylor's 'Daughter of Smoke and Bone' trilogy. Without giving too much of the trilogy away (which I recommend a thousand times over), the story centres around Akiva, a seraph soldier, and Karou, an errand girl raised by demons. When they meet, Akiva is a cold, unfeeling soldier, hardened by time and loss; Karou isn't at all who or what she seems. The book/series deals with themes of past lives/reincarnation, hope, war, memory manipulation, slavery, magic, angst, tragedy and features a lovely slow-burn romance with a twist.
> 
> I have explained that so poorly... At the very beginning of the book, there's an epithet that reads: 'Once upon a time, an Angel and a Devil fell in love. It did not end well'. That sums it up pretty well.
> 
> Many thanks and happy returns to Kanames Harisen, who deals so very swiftly with all my complaints and self-doubts, not to mention beta-ing for me as well. Any remaining errors are my own. I came back in and edited this a fair bit after posting.
> 
>  **DISCLAIMER:** Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

It’s happening again.

 

Daniel Mason scrunches his eyes shut and prays, but he’s not sure anyone’s listening.

 

(Has anyone _ever_ listened?)

 

He tries, though. Maybe when he opens his eyes again, his cutlery won’t be floating. His plate won’t be flickering in and out of existence like a bad television signal.

 

Maybe he’ll be able to convince himself he’s still sane.

 

It hasn’t worked yet, though.

 

And he’s been trying for a damn long time.

 

His lips flutter in unintelligible litanies. His body starts to buckle under the weight of the abject wrongness around him. His hands grab at his too-long white blond hair, tugging it from his scalp until it stings. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. The last refuges of a declining man.

 

But he isn’t a man, though.

 

He looks into the mirror and doesn’t look a day over twenty.

 

He has no idea how old he is.

 

No idea of his name save for what was written on a card he found on the inside of his coat the night he woke up in a furnished flat he didn’t recognise.

 

No friends, no family. Nothing.

 

No memory of anything beyond the past year.

 

The doctors tell him he’s fine, all things considered.

 

And he’s expected to just deal with it?

 

Like there’s enough room in his fucked up head to have to deal with existential musings as well as flying, flickering crockery.

 

He opens his eyes again. Nothing has changed.

 

Daniel falls to his knees and screams.

 

**XXX**

 

Sometimes Daniel wonders at the state of his life. Where he's going, where he came from...

 

But he never wonders for too long.

 

It’s as though when he stumbles on a troubling thought, his brain pushes back, like he’s not meant to be there. Then all he’s left with is a bloody nose and a migraine for his troubles.

 

So he occupies himself with the only job an amnesiac with no known past experience or education can have: errand boy for a bizarre old man that must have lost his marbles decades ago, judging by the things Daniel has to collect for him.

 

And through it all an insidious voice whispers in his ear, telling him the work is so far below someone of his station that he should feel ashamed of himself for doing it.

 

He’s not even sure what his _station_ is.

 

He shares the work with former convicts, immigrants and straight-up oddballs. He’ll get called up at any hour of the day or night, given an outrageous amount of money, and sent all through the bowels of London and abroad, visiting shady auctions and even shadier go-betweens, retrieving things and leaving them at drop points that range from weird, to rare, to the downright un- _fucking_ -fathomable.

 

Sometimes it’s exotic fruits; a priceless piece of china; items of clothing from faraway countries.

 

Sometimes it’s animal teeth.

 

Once, Daniel swears it was _human_ teeth.

 

Tonight, it’s a tusk as tall as he is from an African bull elephant, wrapped from bottom to tip in bright tarp, retrieved from a man at the train station whose smile Daniel could only describe as _pure fucking evil_. Daniel feels sick as he drags it through the empty, glowing streets. It scrapes along the street with a sound like a growl, leaving a line of white in its wake. When he starts to wonder at how to make the journey carrying the tusk about the streets easier and more covert, if perhaps he could carry it somehow, he feels the stab in his temples of yet another migraine and drops the thought altogether.

 

One of the standing rules of his employment is _no questions_ , and it goes both ways. Daniel is far too grateful to have money in hand to start prodding around in things that should, by all rights, be prodded into.

 

But good Merlin, how he’d like to.

 

He stops in his tracks, the base of the tusk dragging to a halt on the rough stones of the road before him. _Merlin_? The wizard from that King Arthur story? He shakes his head and keeps going. It’s been a damn long night; he’ll ponder just how he remembers that and nothing else later.

 

Daniel rounds another corner, staying close to the shadows, closing in on the derelict building bearing a bright blue door with a black hand-print burned into the wood—his delivery point for the night.

 

Then, he sees _her_. Tucked in behind a bin down a dark alley on his right, playing with no success at invisibility to remain out of sight, but without a doubt _, her_.

 

She’s familiar to him in the way figments from dreams are; the familiarity so fleeting he can’t be sure he ever recognised her at all. And the way she looks at him make him think perhaps he isn’t a stranger to her, either.

 

But he’s seen her an awful lot as of late: glimpses of chocolate brown curls billowing out from her high ponytail; flashes of matching, pretty brown eyes that lock onto his own grey ones with something like heartbreak before pulling away like them meeting at all was a horrible mistake; a reach of her hand tamped by a sort of restraint, like she's stopping herself from catching him.

 

He swears, too, that he saw her disappear once; one minute she was concealing herself behind a crumbling brick wall, the next second there was a strange shifting of the light and she was gone, like she'd never been there at all.

 

He thought the headache he'd copped after seeing _that_ would sear his eyeballs clean out of his head.

 

She’s discreet, he’ll allow her that, but it’s obvious she’s following him. Now all he has to do is puzzle out all the many and varied ‘whys’ that go along with that question.

 

He continues on his way pretending he never saw her—though he knows they both recognise the lie—but hits the pause button on the clunky Walkman at his side, muting the soft strings of his Oasis album, and listens in to what she’s saying instead.

 

She’s speaking into something which looks like a mobile phone in hurried, urgent whispers, losing patience fast. He only catches snippets of what she’s saying; she’s trying so hard to stay quiet but it's a clear, still, empty night, and so is everything else. He hears with all the clarity of her speaking into his ear.

 

He almost laughs; she sounds just as crazy as he does.

 

“ _…suppression of magic… obviously not holding…_ don't talk to me like that _... he's no longer a threat… never even was a threat… can’t leave him like this…”_

 

 _Can’t leave him like this._ What the—does she mean _him_?

 

Her voice turns up and down at odd points, squeaking and rising with a passion and determination he doesn’t see a whole lot of these days, least of all aimed at him. He might have even heard a petulant foot stomp once. Whoever it is at the other end of the line—someone named Barry, he thinks, but he can’t quite make her out now that he’s pulled so far ahead—must be shitting bricks at her resolve. He knows he would be.

 

Still, he has a job to do, and the job has to come first—a lesson he learned well when he first started. He comes to a halt before the blue door and knocks seven times in an established rhythm devised by his employer for his cross-country lackeys. The door cracks open with no discernible help... a noise like a groan pours out... and Daniel pushes the tusk inside. A small bag filled with cash is tossed at his feet before the door slams shut without so much as an invitation to share a spot of tea as thanks for his hard work.

 

“You’re welcome,” Daniel mutters as he crouches to pick up the bag, Her Royal Majesty's stuffy face glaring up at him from the notes. He dares the old bat to judge him, like she could do any better were their circumstances swapped.

 

As he rises, he hears the crunch of familiar footsteps, slow and tentative like she's approaching a dangerous animal, abandoning all the stealth (a loose descriptor if ever he used one) her previous followings have held.

 

He turns to look at her, and she’s even prettier up close.

 

But he’s got no time, no cares, no interest in _prettiness_ right then.

 

She lets out a squeak as he stalks towards her, darts her eyes around for an escape. His hands find her shoulders and guide her back against the brick wall behind her, but she allows him to do as he pleases. She keeps one hand tucked within her coat where he thinks she might be carrying some sort of weapon. Daniel doesn’t care if she turns it on him. Whether he gets information or a bullet in his brain, the night will end in some sort of relief.

 

He’s as gentle as he can afford to be, but he can’t afford much.

 

“Who are you?” he hisses, his fingers digging in and finding little more than bone. “Why are you following me?”

 

Her gaze darts about, not settling on any one thing for too long. “My name is… is H-hermione.”

 

He squeezes her tighter; no time for guilt either. “Why are you following me, Hermione?”

 

He can feel her body just about vibrating with nerves, but her name on his lips does something to her; she melts into his hold and slumps, defeated.

 

“I… I had to.”

 

 _Not good enough_. “Why?”

 

She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, rucking up the edge of her sleeve just enough to reveal the angry edges of a reddened scar. He can't even begin to explain why he catches her hand before it falls back to her side and turns the soft, pale side of her wrist up to his gaze. He is gentle as he pushes the sleeve up the rest of the way, uncovering slashes in the shapes of letters gouged into her skin, listening to the sounds of her breath hitching as he does.

 

“Mudblood,” he mutters. The word… doesn’t feel as foreign as it should. Idle fingers trace over the letters with something like memory, like he's done it before. “What’s a Mudblood?”

 

“Nothing,” she whispers, staring down. “Just… a nasty, horrible word.”

 

“Then why do you have it here?”

 

Her eyes close. “I was... attacked. It’s like a brand, I guess.”

 

His fingers are journeying over the two O's when he says, “Sounds bad.”

 

She nods, tearing up again. “It was… terrible.”

 

He lets her hand fall back to her side and takes a step backwards. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

 

She nods like she doesn't want to. “I do.”

 

He stares at her, waiting for her to elaborate. “And?”

 

She shifts in place, shoving her hands into her cloak's deep pockets. “I don’t know… I shouldn’t tell you.”

 

“Why not?” he snaps.

 

“Because it isn’t time yet.”

 

“Time?” He lets out a bitter laugh. “What the fuck does that even mean? Time doesn't mean a goddamn thing to me! I've lost more time than I'd care to count, and have more on my hands than I know what to do with, so I don't particularly care what you think! No—” He jabs a firm finger into the little divot just below her shoulder. "You have information I need and neither of us are going anywhere tonight until I get it!"

 

His panting breaths echo in the narrow alley as she looks around, like she’s waiting for someone to pop out from the shadows and stop her. A whole story plays out over her features before she swallows, then nods to herself. He can almost see the moment her resolve turns to steel, the determination turning her from helpless doll to some sort of unshakeable... warrior. The same sort of grittiness he sees in soldiers on the telly.

 

“You're right," she says, more to herself than to him, and he feels the nervous thrum of anticipation course through him. "Is there somewhere we can go? We probably shouldn’t have this conversation here.”

 

Daniel’s not familiar with the area, so he defers to her knowledge and follows her to an all-night café a few streets over, still bustling with patrons despite the early morning hour. He waits at an outside table while she ducks inside and orders for them, remembering only as she reemerges that he never told her what he wanted.

 

“Earl Grey, milk, no sugar,” she says, placing the cup in front of him.

 

He picks it up by the handle and peers into the cup. “How… how do you know how I take my tea?”

 

Something miserable passes over her face as she slides into her seat. “I’ve been following you, haven’t I?”

 

There’s more she isn’t saying, he can tell, but he drops it for the moment and takes a sip while he waits for her to gather herself. He sighs; perfection.

 

They sip in silence for what feels like a fucking age before he hears her whisper, “I don’t know where to start.”

 

He doesn’t know where he wants her to start, either. He buries his nerves and his apprehensions down and mumbles, “The beginning’s usually a good place.”

 

“Lots of different things make up the beginning.” She draws in a deep breath and goes silent for another long, incalculable moment before starting:

 

“Your memories… they’ve been... changed,” she tells him in a shaky voice. His stomach bottoms out, but even with all its absurdity, it makes too much sense to dismiss.

 

He leans forward, glancing about to make sure no one is listening, lowering his voice to the barest whisper, "Are you... are you with the government?"

 

She laughs, but it's wet with tears and _oh_ , so restrained. “No, nothing like that. There… there was a war. You were a… a prisoner.” A line of tears fall down her cheek. “There were… extenuating circumstances. I asked… you were allowed to leave with your memories of… everything… removed, instead of receiving the Ki… the death sentence.”

 

“The death sentence?” he repeats, horrified. Maybe he doesn't want to know who he is after all? Maybe he _volunteered_ to have his brain wiped. “Fuck, what did I do?”

 

“You were on the wrong side.” She holds out her arm again, the scar stark under the fluorescent lights of the café’s eaves. “The side that gave me this.” Her breath rattles as she shoves the sleeve down again. “I don't... I don't think you wanted to be there, though. But instead of... you know, you were sentenced to five years in the Mug… in this world—”

 

He clutches at her arm again, this time with more urgency. “This world,” he breathes out. “What do you mean, this world? Are there are others?” She opens her mouth, closes it again, looks conflicted. He holds her tighter. “Don’t you dare crap out on me now, Hermione.”

 

“Our world,” she starts, drawing in deep breaths. Her soldierly determination is gone now, replaced with a lost, little girl with answers she doesn't want. “In our world, magic is real.”

 

His first instinct is to laugh, tell her she’s crazy, but what she’s saying makes too much sense. Or perhaps he's just too happy to grasp onto any explanation that doesn't involve his potential insanity.

 

“My cutlery floats,” he tells her, in a blunt, frank tone. “And my plates… flicker, I suppose. And it's not just those; it's heaps of things. Whenever I try to think of the things I can’t remember, it’s like my brain doesn’t want me there. Whenever I try to think of those things for too long, I get the worst headaches imaginable. I nearly got one just then, wondering how to make that tusk easier to pull around.” He tugs at his hair, long overdue for a cut. “Is that magic, Granger? I’m going to need more to go on here than just your word.”

 

She freezes, glancing up at him with wary eyes. “What did you just call me?”

 

“I…” He stops, staring at her face, at the warm eyes, the chocolate-brown curls, the dotting of freckles on her nose that are becoming more and more familiar by the second. “I don’t know how I knew to call you that.”

 

She shakes her head. “The charms must be wearing off much faster than we thought. We didn't anticipate anything like...” She stops short and lunges for his hand across the table, squeezing it too tight to be of any kind of comfort. “Dra—Daniel, listen to me, this is important: has anything else happened to you lately? Anything else strange and unexplainable? Anything at all?”

 

So, so many things that he worries he might lose count. He reaches into the deepest crevices of his memory, hitting back at the sharp stab of pain that jars his temples and robs him of his sight. “I… I swore to Merlin earlier tonight, like how some people swear to God. I’ve never read the King Arthur stories; I have no idea who or what Merlin is. And I…” He lets out a whimper of pain. “I can read Latin, but I never learned. And sometimes…” He closes his eyes and braces his hands on the table, nails digging into the weather-aged wood and gouging scores. “Sometimes, I swear I see people around me appear and disappear like… like magic and fucking hell, Granger, this really fucking hurts!”

 

Daniel falls forward, his forehead hitting the edge of the small table with a thump that rattles his thoughts. His breath leaves him in a forceful gasp and comes back to him in deep, greedy gulps, as though he’ll never taste air again. He’s coming back to himself in slow bursts, sitting back up again, as he watches her dig through a tiny bag, reaching in up to her shoulder to pull out a wishbone, white and dry and brittle with age, triggering yet another burst of pain.

 

“Daniel, listen to me," she says with urgency, her free hand reaching over again to clutch over his tight fists. "I'm sorry, but your memories are held in here. I—or anyone, really—can’t even attempt to put the charms suppressing your magic and everything else back in place without you having these memories in your head. We wouldn’t know where to put them. It’s a slow process of blocking the memories one by one.”

 

“My memories are... why do you have that, Hermione?” he asks, staring at the bone.

 

She stares at it, too. “I asked to keep it.”

 

He looks at her. “Why?”

 

She meets his gaze with something significant, like she's trying to will her meaning into him somehow. “You’ll know why in a moment.”

 

He nods, swallowing past the nervous lump in his throat, rubbing at the throb at his temple. “All right. So, what do we do now?”

 

She hooks a pinkie finger onto one of the wishbone’s spurs, fumbling with nerves, and holds it out to him. “We have to break it.”

 

Doubts creep in, settling so deep in his stomach he's not sure they'll ever be displaced. Maybe just the confirmation of his sanity will be enough to keep living the way he is for just a little bit longer. "Are you... sure we should do this?"

 

She shakes her head. "Not at all."

 

In a strange way, it's her honesty that does it. He reaches out with slow, shaking hands, hooking his own pinkie around the opposite spur. He can feel the magic vibrating off the bone, settling in him with a rightness that feels overwhelming. A rush of warmth surges through him, leaving behind a feeling of strange contentment.

 

“All right. I should warn you, Draco, this isn’t going to be pleasant.” He doesn’t have time to question the name before she lets out another deep, rattling breath, shaking her head like she knows something bad is about to happen. “On three.”

 

One.

 

Two.

 

Three.

 

It pulls apart with a gentle snap for something so immense. He feels a heavy, blowing force slam into him. His mind races with memories:

 

_his childhood, rife with ecstatic highs and wretched lows_

_his father, cold and hard, looming over him; his mother warm and soft at his side_

_his first display of magic and the elation of it_

_his first year at Hogwarts_

_the first time he met the woman standing in front of him_

_the taste of freedom the first time he rode a broom_

_the rush of winning a Quidditch match_

_the dread of the Dark Lord rising_

_the chill of Him living in his house_

_the terror of seeing the war begin_

_the heat of the first time he kissed the woman in front of him_

_the first time they made love by candlelight_

_countless moments stolen between them, all punctuated with the tugging of a wishbone and a wish for the world remade_

_the horror at watching the mutilation of her arm on the floor of his home_

_his disgust at the crimes he was forced to perform_

_his resignation at his capture_

_his heartbreak at his sentence_

_the bottoming out of his stomach at the sight of Hermione in the stands at his trial_

_his acquiesce at the inevitable  
_

_the blissful blank of all those memories leaving him, one by one…_

 

“Draco?” she calls out to him. She's rounded the table, all but sitting in his lap. She sets a hand against his chest, urgency and hope in her voice. “Draco, can you hear me?”

 

His vision clears, white fog making way for baffling, startling clarity and rigid, unerring surety, like his old soul has slipped back to where it belongs.

 

“Granger,” he rasps out, looking up at her in shock. He shoots to his feet and grasps her hands, pulling her to him, close then closer still. She lets out a squeak as he bands her in his arms, burying his face in her ridiculous hair, holding her so tight he never wants to let her go. It takes a moment, but she wraps her arms around him, too, letting out a sigh as she melts into him, her hands clutching at the threadbare fabric of his coat.

 

“Hermione, I… I remember everything.”

 

"I thought you might." She sighs. "I knew we should have changed your hair colour. Your eye colour, too," she says in a voice wistful with regret, fingering the strands. "You're too easy to identify. Too easy to find."

 

"Too easy to... Granger." His hands find her shoulders again, fingers biting through fabric. "Tell me you're allowed to be here. Tell me you aren't breaking every bloody law in the book to be here, doing this, right now?"

 

Her silence is answer enough. "I had to, Draco," she whispers.

 

He lets out a rough growl. "Granger." He tugs her close again and kisses her with firm, punishing pressure. "You stupid, stupid girl."

 

He can feel her nod against him, the dampness of her tears seeping through his shirt. She pulls back just enough to meet his eyes with a look of pure happiness tinged with terrible guilt and defeat. He realises then whatever is in store for him will be handed down to her threefold for interfering, for making judgements she wasn't in any formal position to make, and for following him around in the first place. "So I've been told,” she says. She tugs her way out of his grip and wraps her arms around herself. “Now, come on. We need to go. The sooner the better.”

 

“Where?” He takes a step towards her, but she takes another one back. “Granger?”

 

“You know exactly where, Draco.” Her eyes take on a teary sheen as she shakes her head, like the futility of their situation is crushing her. “I have to take you back. We need to go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Leave a review or come visit me at ally147writes on Tumblr and let me know what you thought :)


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